Many enterprises today have work forces that include employees working at multiple enterprise facilities, employees working remotely, job-sharing employees, part-time employees or other types of employees that may not have an assigned work station in a given enterprise facility. For example, employees of this type include sales executives or other employees that spend large amounts of time traveling and so may visit enterprise facilities in different geographic locations.
Accordingly, an enterprise facility will often include a certain number of work stations that are intended for use by such employees or other users that are only visiting that facility or otherwise temporarily working within that facility. Arrangements of this type are sometimes referred to as “hot desking” or “hoteling” arrangements. These and other similar arrangements generally involve employees or other users temporarily accessing respective work stations that are not exclusively assigned to any particular user. The time sharing of each such work station among multiple users can provide a significant economic benefit to the enterprise in terms of increased work station utilization and reduced office costs relative to an arrangement in which each employee is assigned his or her own work station.
A number of hot desking or hoteling arrangements are known in the art that allow employees or other users to reserve particular work stations in advance of their visits to a given enterprise facility. Such advance reservations provide reduced stress for the visiting employee by removing the need for that employee to search for an available work station upon arrival at the facility. However, these conventional arrangements are problematic in that they are manually intensive and require extensive user involvement. For example, users may be required to check in and check out at the reserved work station. Users that fail to check in or check out but nonetheless utilize the work station can create confusion regarding the current availability of the work station.